Both in a wired or wireless network, it is common that a set of network elements need to communicate with another set of network elements with some particular information. For example, in a 3GPP network, traffic detection function (TDF) needs to exchange information with content delivery network (CDN). The information can include, for example, the type or ID (identification) of the service provided by the servers in CDN.
Traffic detection function, based on packet inspection, is applied in a network to support policy and charging control for services. For this end, it needs to exchange information with content delivery network.
A content delivery network can comprise a set of servers, which are disposed at certain network locations on the Internet. These network locations correspond to geographic locations that have been determined to be proximate to a large number of Internet users, thus they are physically close to a large number of Internet users. Delivering content from these servers in a content delivery network is thus quick and affordable.
To establish communication between two sets of network elements, the commonly adopted mechanism is manual configuration and maintenance. FIG. 1 shows an example of a 3GPP network. Service data are transmitted between user equipment (UE), eNB(evoved Node B), packet gateway (PGW), traffic detection function, content delivery network or public data network (PDN) as the real lines show. And signaling data are exchanged among policy and charging rules function (PCRF), PGW, TDF and CDN as the dashed lines show. It should be noted that although FIG. 1 shows PDN and CDN as two separate blocks, CDN can be part of PDN, which refers to Internet.
According to current practice, to realize communication between a server in TDF and a server in CDN, both servers shall be manually configured with address information with regard to each other. The configuration also should be manually maintained. This means, if there is any change to one server, e.g. IP address of a server in CDN changes, the address information of this server, which is recorded in a configuration file of servers in TDF that can communicate with this server in CDN, should be updated.
The manner of manual configuration is not desirable because it requires a manual operator or a user, and this is inefficient. Besides, in the mechanism, the accuracy of the configuration is questionable because the updating process is time consuming.
Hence, there is a need for an improved solution that ensures efficient and reliable communication between two sets of network elements.